Collected essays originally published in The New Yorker and The New York review of books

A fire in the brain : Lucia Joyce -- Blocked : writer's block -- True confessions : Italo Svevo -- Quicksand : Stefan Zweig -- The frog and the crocodile : Simone de Beauvoir -- Becoming the emperor : Marguerite Yourcenar -- A hard case : Primo Levi -- European dreams : Joseph Roth -- The neapolitan finger : Andrea de Jorio -- The saintly sinner : Mary Magdalene -- After the ball was over : Vaslav Nijinsky -- Heroes and hero worship : Lincoln Kirstein -- "Sweet as a fig" : Frederick Ashton -- American dancer : Jerome Robbins -- Second act : Suzanne Farrell -- The soloist : Mikhail Baryshnikov -- The flame : Martha Graham -- Dancing and the dark : Bob Fosse -- The bottom line : Twyla Tharp -- On the contrary : H.L. Mencken -- After the laughs : Dorothy Parker -- Feasting on life : M.F.K. Fisher -- Finding Augie March : Saul Bellow -- Piecework : Sybille Bedford -- The spider's web : Louise Bourgeois -- Assassination on a small scale : Penelope Fitzgerald -- The hunger artist : Susan Sontag -- Counterlives : Philip Roth -- Perfectly frank : Frank O'Hara -- Devil's work : Hilary Mantel -- Burned again : Joan of Arc

Includes bibliographical references

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